Just a brief comment about djvu text layer, using IA files to digging deeper the topic.
FineReader OCR stores an incredibly detailed information in a proprietary format; then, various FineReader versions export something of this extremely rich set of information into different outputs - one of them being djvu text layer. It's worth to note that even if any information stored into djvu text layer can be extracted and used, the set of information wrapped into djvu text layer (both in lisp-like format or in xml format) is only a minor subset of original OCR information.
If someone is interested to get much more information, it can find it into abbyy.xml output; and Internet Archive gives it as abbyy.gz into the list of exportable files. It's a very heavy and complex xml structure but it is possible to parse it, end to extract from it any information wrapped into djvu text layer and much more - most interestingly, wortPenalty, that is, word by word, the resume of degree of incertainty of OCR recognition of the whole word.
We (I and Aarti) are digging into this mess, with fast preliminary results; you can see into [[it:w:Utente:Alex brollo/Sandbox]] some brief pieces of text extracted from abbyy.gx, where doubtful words (in the opinion of OCR software) are red. They can be easily managed by VisualEditor - caming simply from a simple span tag.
Now, I'm waiting dor Aarti work; as soon a VisualEditor for nsPage will run, it would be possible to extract text by bot from abbyy.gz (if the work comes from IA) and to upload such text as OCR.
Alex
2013/7/16 David Cuenca dacuetu@gmail.com
Hi Aubrey, Thanks for the heads-up, I have CC'ed Sébastien from fr-ws, he worked on the djvu text extraction/merging and he was interested in following-up on that. Maybe he has some fresh ideas about it.
Micru
On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.comwrote:
Hi David, Aarti, thibaud and Tpt, please look at this thread:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium#EPUB.2FHTML_to_Wikitext especially the last message.
It seems George Orwell III knows his stuff about Djvu and Proofread extension, and it's probably worth digging into this "layer text" djvu thing.
Even if I might dream of an ideal solution (a "layered structure" for wikisource, in which text can marked up several times in different layers) that is probably very far away.
But it's still important to pave the way for further improvements, I guess: losing all the information from a formatted, mapped IA djvu it's not a good thing to do, IMHO. And the Visual Editor could help us, in the future, to keep some of that information (italics, bold, etc.)
I know Aarti spoke with Alex about abbyy.xml: is it possible to do something with it?
Aubrey
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